If, for some reason, such as injury, insult, surgery, disease, or the like, the neurological functioning of a patient is interrupted, it has been found that such patient loses some portion of his or her ability to recognize the spatial position and orientation of his or her body and/or parts thereof with respect to itself and/or to the surroundings. As discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,906,193, the term "interruption of neurological functions" is intended to include, not only the occurrences listed above, but any occurrence that affects the neurological or muscularskeletal system of a patient.
This loss of ability is often manifested in a loss of the ability to properly walk, stand, sit, establish and hold proper posture, or to execute gross motor sequential movements, such as rolling and the like. For example, the stroke or disease may inhibit the patient's ability to walk with a normal gait, or may cause that patient to sit at an angle without knowing of the irregularity. In fact, such a patient may be sitting at an angle with respect to the normal upright orientation and feel as though he is in a perfectly proper position and orientation, or may walk with an extremely exaggerated leg movement thinking that he is executing a normal gait.
For these reasons, as well as others which will be known to those skilled in the art of biomechanics and motor skills training, the field of biomechanics has developed several techniques for retraining such a patient to establish normal body positioning, orientation and movement.
Several examples of such techniques were presented and discussed in the parent patent, as well as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,906,193, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. The just-mentioned patent discloses a technique that improves upon the motor skill training techniques by training a patient using a non-tactile process. The non-tactile process overcomes most of the disadvantages of known motor skill training techniques.
While extremely effective, the non-tactile motor skill training technique and mechanism disclosed in the incorporated patent and patent application can still be improved in several areas. For example, to be even more effective, the health care provider conducting the retraining process should have an exact record of the prior training sessions. Such a record will enable the health care provider to plan future training sessions by alerting him to special areas of difficulty for the patient. Since many health care providers have many patients, such a record will enable the health care provider to remember the particular patient with an exactness not possible at the present time.
Still further, an accurate record of a training session can be shared among several health care providers so the patient can be analyzed by more than one specialist. Special programs can be devised using techniques that may not be known to one of the health care providers but may be known to another provider.
Additionally, an accurate record of a training session can be used in a data analysis process whereby a health care provider may be able to develop new techniques and publish his or her findings so other health care providers can benefit from his or her experience. Still further, accurate recording of training session responses could be adapted for computer recording whereby a great number of training sessions from a variety of patients could be analyzed to determine the validity of a particular technique, or to develop new techniques and compare the new techniques to other techniques.
Therefore, there is a need for improving the motor training device and method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,906,913. Specifically, there is a need for improving this device and method by providing means for gathering and recording data associated with one or more training sessions.